Book Details

ISBN 139781849512046

Paperback292 pages

Book Description

Ever wondered how all the great-looking, feature packed, amazing Joomla! sites are made? Would you like to add image transitions, popups, scrolls, AJAX forms, image galleries, no-page reloads to your website, but are worried that they will be difficult to implement? To make any Joomla! site look more professional, interactive, and interesting you need the ease and power of jQuery.

This book will help you to use the jQuery library with the Joomla! CMS. It will take you through adding jQuery functionality to the Joomla! CMS and show how to use it to make the modules and themes more dynamic, interactive, and responsive, and add effects to your Joomla! site.The book starts by showing a plain Joomla! site without any JavaScript enhancement or features, then accompanies you through the process of site enhancement.

First you will learn how to make use of third-party extensions to include jQuery features into your site. These can be image galleries, jQuery powered menus, tooltips, and many, many more. Later on you will learn how to modify your template to add some features to your Joomla! site, You will also learn to build your own jQuery-powered Joomla! extensions, and how to pack them so that you can use them in any project you like. Further, you will learn to create your own modules and components.

By the end of this book, you will have learned how to enhance any Joomla! site with JavaScript and jQuery.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Let's Start Making a Better Site—Images

How Joomla! handles images by default

Adding a jQuery-powered image slideshow module

Image pop ups

Putting images together—image galleries

Tips and tricks

Summary

Chapter 2: Site Content—Our Next Step

Basic concepts on Joomla! content

How Joomla! shows our articles to site visitors

Enhance your site content using JavaScript

Tips and tricks

Summary

Chapter 3: Embedding Rich Media Features with Joomla! Plugins

Concept of plugin—what is a Joomla! plugin and how does it
work?

Tips and tricks

Summary

Chapter 4: One Last Look at Joomla! jQuery Modules

Limitations of Joomla! menu modules

Creative ways of placing login modules in our site

Summary

Chapter 5: Refactoring Our Site

Warning

Removing unnecessary jQuery loads

What happens with jQuery UI

Removing MooTools

Tips and tricks

Summary

Chapter 6: Getting Our Hands on Coding JavaScript

Adding movement to our site's header—Parallax effect

jQuery library jScrollPane

Adding useful tooltips

Summary

Chapter 7: Creating Our Own Modules

Learning the basics of Joomla! module creation

Creating a "Send us a question" module

Making a better form using JavaScript

Warning

What could you check?

What to do next? Packing and installing the module

Summary

Chapter 8: Building Complete Solutions, Modules, and Components

Working with the news rotator module

Creating the component base

How Joomla! helps us work with the database

Modifying our installer to create our table

Coding a basic admin zone

Inserting, editing, and deleting records in our admin zone

Showing our data in our module

Adding jQuery to our module—refreshing data using JavaScript

Summary

Chapter 9: Going Further with Our Component Development

Adding a table paginator plugin to our admin zone

Textarea autogrow plugin

Working on our component's frontpage

Going back to the admin zone

Showing our images in the frontend

Adding a WYSIWYG editor to our component backend

Summary

Chapter 10: Problems and Usability

What happens if JavaScript is disabled?

Using Firebug to help us in our development

Possible problems and solutions with jQuery

Optimizing CSS and JavaScript

Summary

What You Will Learn

Add an image slideshow, image popups, and a gallery to our site

Organize your site content in different tabs, articles, and slideshows and improve its search capability with AJAX searching

Enhance your site with third-party features, codehighlight, Flicker, and more using Joomla! Plugins

Build a dropdown menu with some amazing effects

Refactor and remove unnecessary library loads

Master the technique of coding directly on the template, parallax, scrolls, and tooltips

Build your first Joomla! module, a jQuery powered contact form

Develop a full module or component extension, with some bits of jQuery

Solve usability problems

Authors

Jose Argudo Blanco

Jose Argudo Blanco is a web developer from Valencia, Spain. After finishing his studies he started working for a web design company. After working for six years for that company and some others, he decided to work as a freelance.

Now, after some years have passed, he thinks it's the best decision he has ever takena decision that let him work with the tools he likes, such as CodeIgniter, Joomla!, CakePHP, JQuery, and other well-known open source technologies.

For the past few months he has also reviewed some books for Packt Publishing, such as Magento 1.3 Theme Design, Magento: Beginner's Guide, Joomla! 1.5 SEO, Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development, and Joomla! with Flash. The one yet to be published is Magento Development with PHP.

Alerts & Offers

Series & Level

We understand your time is important. Uniquely amongst the major publishers, we seek to develop and publish the broadest range of learning and information products on each technology. Every Packt product delivers a specific learning pathway, broadly defined by the Series type. This structured approach enables you to select the pathway which best suits your knowledge level, learning style and task objectives.

Learning

As a new user, these step-by-step tutorial guides will give you all the practical skills necessary to become competent and efficient.

Beginner's Guide

Friendly, informal tutorials that provide a practical introduction using examples, activities, and challenges.

Essentials

Fast paced, concentrated introductions showing the quickest way to put the tool to work in the real world.

Cookbook

A collection of practical self-contained recipes that all users of the technology will find useful for building more powerful and reliable systems.

Blueprints

Guides you through the most common types of project you'll encounter, giving you end-to-end guidance on how to build your specific solution quickly and reliably.

Mastering

Take your skills to the next level with advanced tutorials that will give you confidence to master the tool's most powerful features.

Starting

Accessible to readers adopting the topic, these titles get you into the tool or technology so that you can become an effective user.

Progressing

Building on core skills you already have, these titles share solutions and expertise so you become a highly productive power user.